Saturday, September 14, 2013

I've actually been spending a considerable amount of time lately working with the artist on the project, Allison. We've been slowly nailing the style down for a number of things and anticipate future art development to become more and more rapid as we settle into a groove. Refer to the following screenshot:

Anyway, here's what's new since last update:

1. Improved cave tiles. I'm not going to write too much here, but things are looking better now. We're still going to have another pass at them later.

2. Parallax tiles underground. You can't see it in motion from the screenshot, but the underground spikes are parallaxed, meaning they give the illusion of depth by scrolling at a slower rate than the foreground.

3. Player proportions. You're seeing a temporary placeholder sprite as we test the final dimensions of the character. The goal here was to keep the player's collision model at exactly 1x1 tile (that's 32x32 in-game units--actually, we're using 30x30 so that the player can comfortably fit between two tiles). The older character also had these dimensions, but was much taller. It's pretty important to me that the player can accurately and easily gauge, visually, the collision model of the player (so that they know when they're going to get hit by an enemy or a projectile), so the closer the character is to a 32x32 box, the better. Obviously we can't make the graphic square, though, because that would look silly.

4. Better stylistic lighting. Since lights can be any texture we want, we chose to paint a nice cartoony glow instead of the straight gradient of the old textures.